


cut flowers for all my rooms

by icarxs



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Here's How Luke Castellan Can Still Win, I listened to a lot of Lorde while writing this so be prepared for that I guess, Luke is a filthy liar but also we all love him, Multi, the fleece works its magic too well
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-03-25 03:33:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13825584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarxs/pseuds/icarxs
Summary: She catches his blade on her shield, and sparks fly. Under his helmet she can see his snarl, somehow familiar and unfamiliar all at once. She finds herself gasping, like a fucking child, "you tried tokillme!""No more than you would've done for me, baby."——Or: the tale of Princess Andromeda, in three acts.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to Breha and Louise, and by that I mean no thanks at all and I'm sorry in advance.
> 
> every day I seem to get more niche.

Thalia wakes with blood dripping onto her face.

She keeps her eyes closed, because staying dead still had saved her life before. She imagines that she can still feel the hellhounds’ teeth, their hot breath, but as she lies there and feeling returned to her, she becomes aware that what’s dripping onto her face is cold, not warm and sticky, and that her empty hands rest on cool grass and mud. She curls her fingers and feels them sink into the ground, dirt under her nails. There is no answering growl. She opens her eyes. 

It is dark. At first, she thinks that perhaps this is the underworld - but that’s ridiculous. There’s no way Charon would let her skip the queue, and Hades would never let her lie peaceful for this long. After all, it had been his hellhounds on their trail. Besides, her heartbeat is loud in her ears, harsh, as if to remind her, as if to shout to the stars that she lives.

And live she does, against all the odds. She feels strong and well. The injuries she had received in those last frantic days - the broken wrist, the lacerated calf, the head wound that constantly bled into her eyes - all were healed. She knows, too, that she is older. She can feel it in her bones. She thinks that she has spent a long time still. She holds up a hand to her eyes, and that effort is monumental enough that it sends her coughing, harsh and grating like her lungs are bursting, curling upwards, hand flying to her mouth. She rolls onto her side to brace herself against the ground, tears flowing. There is something scratching and heavy around her shoulders; and then hands, supporting her until the fit has passed. A voice that she recognises, that makes her cry all over again in relief. “Thalia - _gods_.”

“Luke,” she breathes, and bursts into tears.

* * *

 

Once the first embarrassing rush of sobbing is over, she is able to think a little more clearly. She is in his arms; they are under a great pine tree, which had hidden the stars from her view. It’s raining, and Luke’s hair - shorter than it had been the last time she’d seen him, as he shoved Annabeth over the boundary and screamed for her - is flattened and soaked through. The wiry wool of the fleece is turned silver in the moonlight; it puddles around her like liquid mercury, and she pulls away and swipes furiously at her face. She never was one for crying; even now it feels like weakness. “What’s happening,” she says, a hand clenched tight in his t-shirt. “I don’t remember…”

But she does. She remembers watching, as if from a long distance, as if from a dream. There had been a minotaur, on a stormy night like this one. Iron bulls, spitting fire; Luke, stumbling across the boundary, soaked in blood; she reaches out, abrupt. “Gods, your eye -”

He flinches as she traces the scar on his face. “They let you die,” he says. His hands cup her face. His eyes are intent; he’s certainly older, she can see the strain on his face. Taller, too, though she is as well; their limbs fit together in an easy tangle as they always did. His hands shake. “Thalia, they let you _die_.”

She is breathing fast. She pulls away, tries to stand, but a wave of dizziness and nausea hits her and she sways and he has to catch her by the shoulders, guide her against the trunk of the tree. He fumbles in a knapsack. “Here, drink.”

The nectar is sweet, warm. It tastes like the burnt coffee they used to drink in Virginia, before they knew how to make it properly. Long nights of trading off shifts, Annabeth with her head on Luke’s lap - _Annabeth_. “Where,” she starts, dread pooling in her stomach. “Annabeth, Luke, where is she?”

She should be here. Thalia’s never been more sure of anything. Luke’s shoulders are familiarly tense - they aren’t safe here. His face contorts in pain and grief, and instinctively Thalia puts out a hand to ward off bad news. “No.”

“I couldn’t - I’m sorry. I was too late.”

“Luke,” she says. “Luke, _no_.”

He pulls her upright. This time her vision stays steady. She is tall enough that he can kiss her temple without bending his head. “There’s no time,” he says, his voice tight. There is a longsword strapped to his hip, and he picks up the knapsack. “We have to go.”

* * *

 

They leave behind the tree, marking the sunrise, and stumble down to the beach. The fleece is heavy, but it’s warm and Thalia feels stronger by the second. The waves are huge; they crash against the sand-dunes like great barriers, like warning signs. Luke keeps hold of her arm, sets a punishing pace, but he doesn’t have to - she’d follow him anywhere. There might be years now between them and their old life; she might feel weak on her feet; her heart might be wide open and broken and bleeding to the pulse of _Annabeth, Annabeth_ , but she’d follow him anywhere. Whenever her legs threaten to collapse under her he urges her on, towards the edge of the water. There, she leans against him, his arm tight around her waist, as he puts his fingers in his mouth and lets out a piercing whistle. Thalia laughs, and shivers. “I could never do that,” she says, to the waves.

She feels him smile into her hair, and then feels that smile waver. “There’s always time to learn.”

The great cruise ship lies just beyond the horizon. The unmanned boat responds to Luke’s touch; when she glances at him he shrugs, and his mouth twists. “Son of the god of travelers,” he says, and she pushes her hair out of her face and wraps the fleece closer around her and lets the salt spray wash the tear tracks from her cheeks. In the shifting light of the ocean his scar turns his face unrecognisable. The sides of the ship are sheer white, unassailable cliffs; Thalia climbs the slippery ladder with shaking hands, her energy, however supplemented by the fleece, almost drained and gone. She recognises the limits of her strength, now, and she’s reached them. Luke can tell. At the top of the ladder there is only one figure, huge, hulking, dressed in what Thalia at first thinks is a fur coat, but then realises is just…his fur. She takes a step backwards. Luke has reached the top of the ladder, and stops her falling backwards into the ocean with a tsk.

“This is wrong,” she says.

Everything is wrong. The ship sings to her and sets her teeth on edge. Luke’s hand is in the small of her back and he propels her forwards. “You need to rest,” he says, soothingly. “Come on. Thank you, Agrius.” There’s a note of command in his voice that she’s never heard before. Thalia’s skin is crawling all over. “Speak nothing of this.”  
She begins to shake, and Luke lifts her - it’s easy for him, as easy as steering their small boat, Hermes, god of lifting girls; she manages not to laugh - into his arms. “Sleep,” he tells her, and he smiles, and everything feels a little less wrong. “I’ll explain everything in the morning.”

And so he does.


	2. i.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’ll do this the honourable way,” she echoed. “Swords in hand.”

When she was on the run, Thalia had learned to close the door in her mind - now she could do it with aplomb, the slam of the door as well practiced as that of a rebellious teenager. She kept her mind tidy, god-free. She caught glimpses of them at the edges as the _Princess_ _Andromeda_ crossed the great blue expanse of the Pacific, fluttering, trying for a weakness, but none of them forced their way in. Clearly they either didn’t have the taste for the risk of brain damage, or they just didn’t care enough. Once she even sensed her father, his thunderous might waking her in the middle of the night, a rare attempt at contact. Later she looked back and knew why she had kept them out so stubbornly, like a little girl who refuses to open the closet door, knowing that there are monsters inside - at the time, she told herself that she deserved her privacy. After everything, surely she was allowed to keep her thoughts to herself.

 

* * *

“This is your cabin.”

Luke held the door open for her, and she scowled at him, and he bowed, a mockery of a gentleman. This one act of familiar teasing was, Thalia thought, enough to sustain her for centuries.

It was the early morning; she had not slept more than three or four hours, but she felt entirely rejuvenated - stronger, in fact, than she had in months (or years, more accurately). Luke, who had deposited her in the nearest cabin once she’d fallen asleep and dozed himself in the chair by her bedside, looked rather more dishevelled. In the clear pink light of the dawn she saw him clearly; older, careworn, frightened, with that long scar and a familiar spark of anger in his eyes.

The ship was populated, but the passengers were heavily under the influence of some sort of magic. “The Mist,” Thalia said aloud, watching one family - all-American, two sons, a dad with a baseball cap - pass the door with glazed eyes. She remembered Grover explaining it to them somewhere in New Jersey. The carpet was plush and soft beneath Thalia’s ragged sneakers. Luke nodded and closed the door with some finality.

The room was huge - a stateroom, Thalia’s brain supplied. She had grown up in that odd in-between stage; her mother had had some money, and they had certainly had expensive things, but Thalia had gone without food more often than not, and their apartment had been crawling with filth. Functional poverty. Poverty with a fur coat. This room reminded her a little bit of that. In places the gilt paint was peeling, and the sway of the deck beneath her feet made her nauseous. None of that mattered when she saw the ensuite. “A _shower_ ,” she breathed.

Luke grinned. “Don’t say I don’t know how to treat a girl.”

There was something a bit flat about him that couldn’t be explained away just by the lack of sleep, or by her return. Thalia caught him glancing in the huge golden mirror above the false fireplace, as though he wasn’t sure his face was still his own, and she caught his wrist, her stomach twisting again. Something was _wrong_. “Hey,” she said, softly.

He turned his arm in her grasp and took her hand. “Hey,” he said, seriously. He looked into her eyes; his were just as blue as she remembered. “I promised I’d explain and I will. Have a shower.” He glanced around the room. “I’ll have someone bring up some food for you, and a change of clothes. Then we can talk.”

Oddly, the fleece had sapped Thalia of the hunger she knew she should’ve felt; she was as energised as she would have been after a full night’s sleep and a cooked breakfast. She nodded anyway, though. Luke had always been like this; he liked to _host,_ always felt better when he had something practical to do with his hands. Tentatively, cautiously, she stood on tiptoes (he was taller than her now? That felt particularly unfair) and kissed him on the mouth. She felt the scratch of a day’s worth of stubble and the warmth of his skin. He had flushed a little when she pulled back. “We’ll talk,” she confirmed, and disappeared into the bathroom.

 

After her shower, Thalia found the stateroom empty. She changed into fresh jeans and a faded black t-shirt, smiling as she did so - at least he hadn’t provided a sailor’s uniform. Her hair hadn’t grown during the time she had been a tree ( _was there a support group for these things?_ Thalia thought, combing out the spiky waves so they didn’t look so much like spines. _Daphne must’ve started one_ ), but she had let it grow during the race for Half-Blood Hill and it brushed her collarbone when she leaned forward. Her eyebrow ring was gone; she imagined the silver worked into the bark of the tree like a brand, like a streak of ichor. Her eyes glared back at her in the fancy mirror, stormy blue, and when she leaned in and wrinkled her nose she could see the freckles across the bridge. All the same, but all different too; her face was leaner, sharper; her lips were more full. Her breasts and hips were fuller; she had a layer of plumpness where there had once just been muscle. Her eyebrows were more hooked, and she could see that the long white scar down her throat had disappeared. In the shower she had noticed several blank patches of skin that had once told great stories; it was a little bit sad, as if the map of her life had been wiped clean. There wasn’t even any scar tissue in her eyebrow. The fleece.

Grabbing an apple from the table, Thalia tossed it up and down as she performed a hurried but thorough search of the room. She came up empty handed - there were no weapons, but no traps, either. She had learned the hard way to always search a room before you got attached; for a twelve year old, she had run away from more than her fair share of fireballs, back in the day. She chewed her lip. She felt exposed without a weapon, but there was no celestial bronze in here, so she pulled on her old sneakers and padded to the door. She listened. She could hear the faint scratchy sound of a tannoy announcing a water polo match after lunch, and laughed.

It wasn’t the most absurd place she and Luke had made their home. Gods - the first place they had taken Annabeth, after -

Thalia opened the door to the corridor, stepped out, and slammed it shut behind her, leaving Annabeth’s ghost in the stateroom.

 

The Mist was thick; perhaps, Thalia thought, slipping past the sudden rush of tourists dressed in swimming costumes and arm-bands, it was that that was making her sick, not the boat. Ship. Thing. Out on the deck the motion was hardly noticeable, save for the soft rumbling of the engine, but the ocean seemed to be going past at impossible speeds. Leaning over the edge of the gunwale, Thalia could just make out the golden lettering printed on its huge white hull: **PRINCESS ANDROMEDA** , and then she stood back hurriedly, the distance between the deck and the blue-green ocean below making her dizzy. As she watched, the fin, and then the body of a dolphin leapt from the water, chasing the waves that parted about the bow - then another came, then another. Laughing, Thalia beamed as, impossibly, they kept pace with the magical boat.  They were squeaking at her. “I see you!” she said, waving. “Yes, I’m paying attention!” One of them leapt full-scale out of the water and did a somersault; Thalia saluted gravely, fist clenched over heart. “You’re a _very_ special dolphin. Yes you _are!_ ”

If dolphins could have scowled with frustration, these would have done. Instead, they vanished, just as abruptly as they had come, and Thalia realised that in her distraction she had almost reached the helm. She could see the tangled black, painted hair of the chained princess that leaned out over the water, her rosebud mouth opened in a great scream, her blue eyes wide with terror. From behind, the artist had even included the chains wrapping around her body, though painting them seemed rather a waste of time. It was only the crew who could appreciate the craftsmanship this close.

“Cheery,” she mumbled to herself, turning on her heel.

 

She passed the mortals playing water polo; she also passed several people who were clearly not mortal at all. Two women with snakes for legs slithered past, hissing to one another, sharp teeth gleaming; there was some kind of giant sunning himself on three sun loungers by the Hawaiian themed bar, and Thalia was fairly sure she saw something with spines and scales curled up in the jacuzzi, bubbling contentedly. Was this some sort of holiday camp for monsters? She tried not to be afraid, but all her instincts were screaming at her to run - she’d never met a _nice_ monster, after-all.

What was weird was that not a single one noticed her. There were no sudden shouts of “juicy demigod, over there!” and the giant didn’t even look up from his copy of _US Weekly_ as she nervously strode past at double time. She managed almost three circles around the upper decks of the ship before someone tapped her on the shoulder, and by then she was so desperate for some, _any_ kind of acknowledgement that she considered thanking whatever monster was about to spear her.

There was no spear, but there was a monster. The great half-bear, half-man creature that Thalia remembered hazily from the night before stood, clad incongruously in a pair of denim cut-offs and nothing else. He spoke gruffly: “Thalia, daughter of Zeus?”

She stared up at him. He was well over seven feet tall, and intimidating for someone who probably got really fluffy if they were blow-dried. She eyed the sword that hung at his hip with jealousy, her wrists suddenly feeling startlingly bare. She missed _Aegis_. Presumably the tree had absorbed her shield as well. “That’s me,” she said, lamely.

He nodded at her, almost a bow. “General Castellan requests your presence.”

_General?_ “Okay,” she said. And then again, more to reassure herself than anything else, feeling the hairs on the back of her neck standing up: “okay.”

The mortals moved out of their way instinctively as she followed the bear through the winding corridors of the ship. Thalia wasn’t sure she liked the way they did it; it was deferential, but blank. She had never liked the idea of the Mist anyway, though manipulating it had come so easily to her that she had never even asked what it was called, until Grover had filled them all in on that long cold evening, a week before they had reached the Camp. It felt wrong; it felt like a violation, to make people blind, to take away their memories; it created a squirming sickness inside her that she found it difficult to ignore. The bear didn’t seem to notice them as he passed the door to Thalia’s room and kept on walking. She was soon completely lost; it was like a maze down here, sharp corners turning into huge halls, all covered with that plush red carpet that peeled up at the edges, faded grandeur.

The walls were painted a soft cream, and every so often they were indented with portholes, through which the sea churned. As they went deeper into the interior of the ship, the carpet grew softer under their feet, and Thalia, dizzy, knew that there was no way all of this was contained on one cruise liner, no matter how awe-inspiringly huge. There was Mist around the edges here, too, strong enough that it even charmed her. It was like some kind of Chinese puzzle box, continually unfolding. She stopped to glance through a set of huge double doors, and found herself looking into a training arena, half a coliseum, really. Weapons racks lined the walls, and in the middle were two young guys around her age, or perhaps Luke’s, in full Greek armour. They were sparring; one wielded a short battle-axe, and the other a sword, and the clanging that they made when they lunged for one another felt absurdly comforting. Thalia realised that they were the first real people she had seen - not Mist-addled, and certainly not monsters. Demi-gods. They kicked up golden sand when they moved, and as one of them ducked and rolled, she heard him laugh.

The bear cleared his throat, and Thalia dragged herself away from the fight, hurrying to catch up with him. They passed a cafeteria, where two hellhounds had their muzzles buried in chili-con-carne, and what looked like a ballroom, the walls lined with mirrors that reflected her small figure back again and again and again into infinity. Finally they reached a grand set of golden double doors. This deep into the ship-that-wasn’t-a-ship, Thalia could feel the warmth of the engine rumbling through her feet, like the purring of a giant cat. The bear eyed her, as if to say, _I don’t know why he’d want to see you_, before raising one huge furry fist and knocking.

The sound echoed within the room, and Thalia’s shoulders tensed, but then, to her relief, Luke opened it. He looked so normal that he took her breath away; even the tousled state of his hair and the irritable expression on his face reminded her painfully of early mornings in Virginia. Then he saw her, and his face relaxed into a grin. “Oh, good,” he said, “it’s just you. Thank you, Aegeus.”

The bear bowed, fist clenched over his chest in a salute, before he turned and padded away. Thalia watched him go, head tilted to one side, as Luke leaned against the doorframe. His huge paws were almost silent on the carpet. “Do you think he could ever get sneakers to fit?” she commented, idly. Luke snorted.

“Weirdly, I’ve never asked.” With a faintly sarcastic expression, he pushed the door properly open. “Come on, come in.”

Thalia stepped inside and blinked. Instead of the electric light she was expecting, the room was flooded with sunshine, which streamed in through the great bay windows. They were right at the prow of the ship, and in front of them was nothing but ocean, a deep, delicious blue. Larger than her stateroom - gods, larger than her childhood apartment - the room was plush and comfortable looking, but even here there were signs of wear and tear.  The huge desk had chips taken out of the side of it, as though someone had lost their temper with a very heavy paperweight, and in patches the armchairs and couch seemed worn and fraying. The desk was piled high with all manner of things, and instinctively Thalia wandered over to snoop; maps jumped out of her, a map of New York city, a map of Long Island. There was an intricate drawing of a great labyrinth, but it made no sense - there were dead ends everywhere, and the thing had no centre. She saw great lists of supplies, and of names, but there were none she recognised. She chewed her lip as she leafed through them, and she heard the soft _thump_ of Luke throwing himself into one of the chairs. “By all means,” he drawled, “don’t ask permission.”

She grinned over her shoulder at him. He had his legs flung up over the arm of the chair, and one arm behind his head; he grinned back. Both of them revelled for that moment in each other’s company, before she returned to her rifling. “Are you going to clue me in any time soon?” she asked, after a moment of comfortable silence had passed. “Or am I supposed to guess.” She pulled out of the pile a rather technical sketch of a hellhound in armour and waved it at him.  Luke stretched.

“I don’t really know where to begin.” He tilted his head back to look at her, so he was practically upside down. “Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

She did, the paper still clenched in her fist. The couch was comfortable, but she was right about the fraying, and she plucked at a lose thread as she watched him. From close up, his posture seemed almost _too_ relaxed, and she could read the tension in the tendons of his forearm, stark as he flexed his left hand over and over. He took a deep breath. “Since you - well, since what happened to you. To you and Annabeth.” His eyes flicked over her quickly, and Thalia blinked, hard, her throat tight with abrupt grief that she determinedly stifled. “Things have changed. The gods - well, they weren’t any better than we ever expected. You know how we used to talk - it was just as we imagined. They don’t care about us: they never have cared about us. They use us to fight their little proxy wars, and we take the brunt of the punishment, the violence. Your father - he could have saved you, but instead he stood by and let you die. Athena, Ares, Hera - none of them lifted a finger that night, and some of them did worse than that. When I asked to prove myself - well.” The way he talked was abrupt, fragmentary, as though he was trying to collect his own thoughts and present them to her, tied in a neat parcel, and Thalia shook her head at him.

“Stop it,” she said, “just tell me. Tell me the truth.”

And so he did. Hermes had sent him to the Garden of the Hesperides, to steal a golden apple - a quest that no one since Hercules had succeeded in doing, and a quest that Hercules had already done. With a twist to his mouth, he told her of the two demigods who had died under Laedon’s claws, and gestured to his face, where the scar moved with him, a part of him. He had failed, and he had stumbled across the boundary of the camp, half blind, unsuccessful. The gods had ignored any prayers the Camp sent to them; Zeus assigned Dionysus to control them, and he hated them all. “He couldn’t care less if we lived or died,” Luke said. “In fact, I think he would have happily watched us all starve, if it weren’t for Chiron.”

“The centaur,” Thalia said quietly. At some point, like circling planets, they had migrated, so they were both seated on the floor, backs to the wall. The fireplace was on their right, with its mantelpiece of false marble and its huge gilded mirror, but they were both more comfortable here, away from the softness and the cushions. “He trained Achilles. And Jason.”

“And Achilles _died_ ,” Luke spat. “And Jason - what happened to Jason? He betrayed his wife, and in return she slaughtered their children and served them to him on a meat platter. What happened to Hercules? Hera cursed him, and he went mad and killed his own lover.” He shook his head. In profile, as the sun began to set, he seemed dark and unknowable. He waved a hand, as if to dismiss his own, inherited grief. “No, Chiron - he did his best. But what could he manage, against the wrath of the gods.” Luke pressed his lips together, until they went white with the pressure. “So when it happened - when I got the offer…”

“The offer,” Thalia repeated. It wasn’t a question. She had always known that Luke, however talented he was, however charming, could not have commandeered this great a force alone. “Who?”

A shadow crossed Luke’s face. He turned towards her, and his expression was pleading. “Thalia - you have no idea. What it was like, with you gone; he sent me dreams, and he told me his plans. I stole Zeus’s master bolt, and I planted it on another demigod, a son of Poseidon. There would have been a war, a war like none other, brother against brother, and for once, _we_ would have come out on top. When the gods were weakened…” he trailed off, shaking his head, and despite herself, Thalia reached for his hand. She turned it over, palm up, and traced the deep fork of his life-line.

“What happened?” she asked, her mouth dry. His head was bent with hers, and together they watched her fingers move up and down.

“Fucking Percy Jackson happened,” he sighed, more a sound of mourning than a curse. “Son of Poseidon. I underestimated him; I misjudged him. I thought perhaps I could make him see…but he was - he _is_ \- too young. Too like his father.

“And you are too like yours,” Thalia said, and then regretted it immediately, but Luke wasn’t angry, or offended. Instead, he looked up at her, and there was rueful laughter on his face.

“I suppose I am,” he said, then shrugged the thought away. “Percy outsmarted me. He stopped the war before it had even begun, returned the bolt to Zeus.” He shuddered at the memory. “I failed. But I won’t this time. This time, I’ll do things my way - no subterfuge, no stupid, behind-the-scenes workings.” He linked their fingers together. “We’ll do this the old-fashioned way, army against army, but this time, the gods won’t come out on top.”

Thalia drew in a smooth breath. She could almost see it in front of them, laid out like one of Luke’s maps. The gods on their knees before them. They could make them pay for everything - for Annabeth. For _Jason_ , she thought, shocked at the sudden, vivid memory of her brother, two years old, blue-eyed, golden-hearted, looking at her like she hung the moon, like she could always keep him safe. There was that fluttering at the edges of her mind again, and fiercely, furiously, she shoved them away. “We’ll do this the honourable way,” she echoed. “Swords in hand.”

The look of relief on his face was bare and vulnerable. Abruptly, impulsively, he leaned forward and kissed her, a proper kiss, this time; there was nothing tentative about it, and Thalia let out a noise that might have been one of surprise, or one of pleasure, and wound herself close to him. Her hand entangled in his hair, which slid through her fingers, cropped short and practical but soft as corn-silk. Her other hand was still linked with his, trapped between them, and when he pulled away his eyes were hazy. “I knew,” he said, and his voice was hoarse. “I _told_ him we’d need you, it took me forever to convince him to let me go and get the fleece, but I knew. We can’t do this without you. I can’t do this without you.”

“Him,” Thalia said. They were so close that she could see the puckered edges of his scar, and the single freckle underneath his right eye, the one that he always tried to brush away, forgetting it was a part of him. She let go of his hand and cupped his face between her palms. He looked only half-present, his eyes on her mouth. “Luke, who _is_ he?”

He looked her in the eyes, then. “Kronos,” he said. “King of the Titans. Who has more of a grudge against them than he does? Who else has the power.” He licked his lips, as though nerves had made them dry. “He’s the only one who can help us. He was the only one I could -”

“I understand,” she interrupted, because she did understand what it was like to turn around and see nothing in front of you but monsters, and to have no one at your back. “Luke, I _understand_.”

* * *

They were silent for a long while after that, because there wasn’t anything else they needed to say. He kissed her, with her back against the fireplace, the stone cool under her hands as she braced herself, as though without it she would melt into the scarlet carpet. Luke kissed like he did everything else - that is to say, as if nothing else mattered, and as if he would rather die than stop. There was something about the way that he focused all his concentration on her that made Thalia weak at the knees. She imagined what he would be like in battle; she didn’t know how anyone would be able to take their eyes off him.

When they were younger, on the run, her thirteen, almost fourteen, him just pushing sixteen, he had kissed her one day in the ruins of an old factory somewhere out in Queens. She couldn’t remember where Annabeth had been - asleep, most likely, as Thalia usually took the first watch. He had been nervous, then; neither of them had kissed anyone before, but it seemed right that it would happen like that. She could remember the smell of copper from the old rusting pipes, and the grit of coal dust underneath her combat boots. “Is this okay?” he’d asked her, lip caught between his teeth when he’d pulled back, his blue eyes shadowed in the dim light from their old fire. The newspaper crackled in it as the final piece caught alight, sending sparks up towards the ceiling. He had had one hand braced by her head; she remembered it vividly, the feeling of being framed. He had been tall and gangly, not grown into his hands or his feet, his shoulders broad but sharp and pointed. She had laughed at him, trying to keep her voice low, her hands folded in the small of her back, like to touch him would be going too far. Fourteen, and the first sweep of his tongue over hers felt like the biggest step they had ever made.

They had kissed for a long time in the grimy shadows, unwieldy, messy, uncertain. His hands had been chaste on her hips, even when he pressed into her with a sudden shudder, and he kept saying, into her mouth, “is this alright? Are you okay?” as if Luke Castellan had ever been able to make Thalia Grace do something she didn’t want to do. This time, on the boat full of monsters in the stateroom with the peeling paint and the half-shattered chandelier, he didn’t ask, and she didn’t want him to.

At some point she ended up on his lap. It couldn’t have been comfortable; he was kneeling half-on the base of the fireplace, and the stone was digging in to one of his knees, but she couldn’t imagine being anywhere else than here, with her back against the wall and her thigh hooked up around his hip as he kissed her breathless. His teeth were sharp on her lower lip, and she hissed and dug her nails into the small of his back and felt him make a desperate noise against her. Thalia felt like if she didn’t get her hands on him she would just _die_ , and she pulled away to say so, but then his mouth was on her jaw and then his teeth were on her throat and she couldn’t _breathe_ , she couldn’t think. “Jesus,” she said, which somehow felt more blasphemous than calling on the damn _gods_. “Jesus Christ.” She caught sight of his grin in sharp flashes like a wolf, and tugged hard on his hair. “If you make a dumb joke, I will _kill_ you.”

“Wow,” he said, into the hollow of her throat. “That is so harsh.” And then he was pulling the shirt over his head, so there wasn’t really time for murder.

After that it was easy; Thalia realised, in a lurch of something like jealousy, something like amusement, that Luke knew what he was _doing_. There was more amusement than jealousy, because when he laid her onto the pillows in the great state bedroom, the hideous bed with its red velvet headboard and frayed canopy, his eyes were dark and blown wide, and when she arched up towards him, easy and slick and pliable, his head between her thighs, she felt him shudder like a whip-lash all the way up his spine. It was like when they used to laugh together at the girls who would double-take at him on the subway, _what do they know?_ only this time it was tinged with a triumph she thought she liked. Sex wasn’t much of an advancement, she thought, than stitching wounds, only with a more satisfying outcome. He slept, then, with an arm heavy around her waist, and she, the fleece’s energy still humming through her blood, better than the strongest coffee, lay awake and traced the scar on his face and the longer, fainter ones that spanned his ribcage, flattening her palm against them, scar to finger, four, claws. He woke after an hour or so and held her down until she was something close to begging, and Thalia thought, Aphrodite, I’m _sorry_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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